Leslie Stahlhut

In my non-crochet time, I have been working to bring order to my crochet empire.

As such I have spent many hours sorting through stacks of patterns, piles of books, even larger piles of yarn. As I do this, I put “like with like,” so there are pattern piles, book piles, unfinished object piles, finished object piles, and some very, very very large yarn piles.

The idea behind putting like with like is that once everything in a particular category — say books — is all in once place, it will be easier to choose what stays and what goes.

That’s the theory.

In practice, once I confront a monumental pile of like objects, I find myself thinking that it might be easier to just start over, but then even starting over strikes me as a monumental chore, so I go back to the nearest pile and use my limited stores of decision making power and decided away.

One thing I have learned from this exercise is that that having too many options prevents me from effectively using the options I have at my disposal — even if they are just an arm’s length away — so as I sort through the piles, I am trying to figure out what’s next.

Eventually, however, I took a break from all of the decision making and turned my attention to a eight-petal crochet flower I found while making my valiant attempt to create order.

I wanted to square it off so that it could become part of my seven-inch crochet square project inspired by Project Amigo.

I got off to an inauspicious start that was quite wavy, but along the way, I started to figure out what needed crocheting:

Squaring off an eight-petal crochet flower

so I frogged here, crocheted there, and eventually, I got it mostly figured out:

The crochet flower nearly squared off

Which meant I could focus my crochet efforts on the piles of five-inch squares I have been working on recently, and I began weaving in the ends and securing the crochet appliqué flowers I have made for some of the squares:

Then, before embarking on the last round of errands for the day, I got this group photo of all the five-inch squares:

Seventeen five-inch crochet squares ready to go

As I sort through the myriad elements of my crochet empire and try to figure out what to take forward with me, my actual crochet time becomes a refuge, where the only way to move forward is to make one stitch (or weave in one ends )at a time.